Arthur was still scrolling through the ethereal interface when a sharp, distinct creak echoed from the hallway outside his bedroom door.
Before his conscious mind could even process the sound, his new body reacted. He dropped instantly behind the heavy mahogany study desk, his hand blindly reaching into the top right drawer and closing around the cold, checkered vulcanite grip of a revolver.
Pulling it into the lamplight, he immediately recognized the familiar break top design, it looked exactly like a Webley Mark VI. However, a quick glance along the metal cold frame revealed a strange discrepancy: it completely lacked any of the official Webley branding or manufacturing stamps.
Crouched in the shadows, he didn't bother to think of it much and popped the cylinder open with a quiet click, running a pale thumb over the rims of the six brass cartridges resting inside. It was fully loaded. He snapped it shut.
Rising into a low crouch, he moved toward the door with absolute silence, the floorboards somehow failing to betray his weight. He eased the bedroom door open a fraction of an inch, peering into the dim hallway. The layout of the second floor was simple: his master bedroom sat at the front of the house, while a guest bedroom and a bathroom sat further down the hall, directly across from the staircase leading to the ground floor.
Near a large potted fern at the top of the stairs, a small silhouette shifted.
A cat.
It was a scrawny, slightly wet tabby black thing sitting casually on the Persian runner and licking a damp paw.
Arthur let out a long, silent breath, the tension bleeding out of his shoulders. He lowered the heavy revolver, stepped back into his room, and turned to set the weapon down on his desk—
Wait.
A jagged fragment of Arthur Sturridge's memory pierced his skull. A distinct, visceral feeling of annoyance.
The detective didn't like pets. He didn't own a cat.
If the cat wasn't his, it had come from the outside. In the middle of a torrential downpour. Which meant an entry point was open, and whoever had broken into his house, whoever had murdered him and brought his body back, might still be inside. Or at the very least, they had left a fresh trail.
All lingering relief vanished, replaced by an icy, hyper-focused vigilance. He scooped the Webley back up. From a neat box on the edge of his desk, he retrieved a pair of tight latex gloves, snapping them over his pale hands with practiced ease.
He slipped out of the room, fully assuming the role of a hunter. He checked the second floor first. His own room, the master bedroom, featured a large bay window overlooking Minsk Street; the latch of the window was secure. He moved down the hall to the guest bedroom. It contained a set of glass doors opening out onto a balcony that overlooked the backyard. They were also locked tight.
The adjacent bathroom was also equally secure.
With his back against the wall, he descended the wooden staircase, leading with the barrel of the Webley.
The ground floor opened into a spacious parlor with a cold fireplace and another bay window, positioned directly beneath the one in his bedroom. Empty. The adjacent downstairs toilet was clear.
Finally, he approached the kitchen at the rear of the house. It was a wide, slightly cluttered space illuminated periodically by the flashes of lightning through a large overhead skylight. The back wall featured a large, low-sill window that doubled as a makeshift door leading out to the backyard.
As he stepped into the room, his eyes immediately caught the unnatural setup on the counters.
This wasn't just a kitchen; it was also a makeshift chemistry lab. Glass beakers, Bunsen burners, and coiled distillation tubes sat among the pots and pans. As Arthur was looking through the stuff over the countertop, a sudden influx of his predecessor's memory triggered a blaring alarm in his subconscious.
Something was wrong.
His eyes locked onto a heavy, custom-made centrifuge sitting among the clutter. It was an intricate apparatus driven by a system of interlocking brass gears and a side-mounted hand crank, designed to rapidly spin the three glass vials currently secured in its rotating wheel.
It had been shifted roughly two inches to the left of its original resting place.
He tracked his gaze from the disturbed lab equipment to the large back window. It was cracked open just a sliver, letting in a draft of cold, rain-scented air.
On the wooden sill, barely visible, were tiny, wet paw prints.
Here. This is where the cat got in. And it's exactly where the murderer exited from.
As he secured the window, a faint flicker of light caught the corner of his eye.
[Exploration: +3]
He blinked, pulling up his profile interface. Sure enough, the previously empty currency line had updated.
Sparks Held: 3
He already had a solid grasp on how his system seemed to operate. Without hesitation, he navigated to the [Abilities] tab. He spent the 3 Sparks to unlock the Discipline Affinity Perk, which immediately prompted him to select a vampiric Discipline. The choice was obvious for a detective hunting a killer in the dark. He selected Auspex, and unlocked its foundational node: Heightened Senses.
The moment he confirmed the selection, a violent, splitting headache tore through his skull. The sound of the rain outside magnified into a deafening roar, and chaotic, overlapping whispers hissed in his ears, a cacophony of auditory hallucinations that threatened to shatter his already precarious Sanity. He gripped the edge of the kitchen counter, gritting his teeth until the agonizing sensation finally settled into a cold, hyper-aware clarity.
He activated the Discipline.
The world shifted. The darkness of the kitchen peeled back, unveiling a terrifyingly detailed spectrum of reality. The scent of ozone, damp earth, and old copper flooded his nose. He leaned close to the window pane, peering through the glass down into the mud of the backyard.
There, washed almost completely smooth by the torrential rain, was an impression in the mud. With his normal eyesight, it would have been invisible, but to his heightened vampiric senses, the subtle compressions in the soil practically glowed.
Shoe size 7. Men's dress shoe. A slight wear pattern on the outer heel.
Scanning the frame and the floor, his heightened senses rapidly pulled three more clues from the ether. A faint, lingering odor of cheap, pungent pipe tobacco clinging to the draft. A microscopic scuff mark of black boot polish on the upper latch of the window, indicating the intruder was a male of average height, roughly five-foot-nine. And caught on a jagged splinter of the wooden sill, was a macroscopic, single, coarse thread of dark wool.
He opened the back door and stepped out into the heavy rain, his clothes soaking through instantly. He traced the faded footprints across the yard, letting them lead him straight toward a small wooden storage shed at the far edge of the property.
A bit cliché, isn't it? But the classics are classics for a reason, right? he thought, gripping his revolver tightly.
He moved silently across the mud, measuring each step as he reached the shed.
Taking a deep breath against the rain, he kicked the splintering door wide open and immediately stepped inside, sweeping the barrel of his gun through the cramped shadows.
Nobody was inside.
But the heavy iron padlock on the door had been expertly picked and left hanging on the hasp. This had clearly been a staging ground. But for what?
Looking down at the dirt floor inside the dry shed, Arthur frowned. There was another set of footprints here, the exact same size 7 shoe. But the depressions in the dirt were significantly deeper than the ones out in the yard.
He was carrying something incredibly heavy when he stood in here. So why were his footprints near the house so shallow? Did he drop the weight here?
Or did he carry my dead body inside, and leave empty-handed? But that doesn't make sense.
The contradiction was deeply thought-provoking. It suggested either an accomplice, a change in mass, or something far more supernatural.
Stepping back out into the freezing rain, Arthur noticed something else with his heightened senses: the tracks leading away from the shed in the opposite direction were just as deep and heavy as the ones inside. He followed their trajectory toward the high brick wall that enclosed the rear of the property. There, set into the masonry, was a heavy wooden gate that opened directly into the dark, narrow back alley.
The padlock on this gate had also been expertly picked and left dangling from its iron latch.
A vivid scenario of what might have happened began forming in his head. This was a premeditated, carefully mapped-out infiltration and escape route. It was highly likely that the killer had hauled his dead body from the back alley, through this wooden gate, and into the yard. For some inexplicable reason, they had paused inside the shed, perhaps using some unknown method to make themselves and their heavy burden virtually weightless.
From there, leaving only the faintest, featherlight impressions in the mud, the assassin had slipped straight through the kitchen window, carried his corpse all the way to the second-floor master bedroom, and carefully deposited him on the cyan sofa.
The freezing rain soaking through his thin sleepwear finally broke his concentration. With the sequence of events roughly pieced together, there was nothing more to glean from the dark yard.
Returning quickly to the safety of the house, he locked the back door, shed his wet clothes, and retreated upstairs to the master bedroom. He immediately grabbed the orange pocket notebook and a fountain pen, sitting at the desk to document his findings.
He didn't write in English. Nor did he use the native, English-like script his inherited memories supplied as Loenese.
Loen...
He paused, the pen hovering over the paper. Why did that name sound so incredibly familiar? It tugged at the edges of his memories from his past life, triggering a faint sense of existential dread that he couldn't quite place.
Shaking off the distraction, he pressed the nib to the paper and began encrypting his clues, writing entirely in Korean hangul. If whoever killed him came back to destroy the evidence again, they wouldn't be able to decipher a single word that he was writing now.
He had just finished the last line, detailing the bizarre weight discrepancy of the footprints, when the sudden ringing of the doorbell echoed from downstairs, shattering his focus.